American Crime: Legal and Social Definitions

• The book is about the American experience and social reaction to crime, examining the history of the US criminal justice system from its colonial origins to the present.
• It introduces basic concepts and themes that will be explored throughout the book.

Crime

• Crime is a legal concept; it is conduct that is "against the law".
• Crimes are forbidden acts, unlike breaking contracts, driving carelessly, slander, or infringing copyrights.
• A civil case differs fundamentally, and a criminal case has a different lifecycle.
• A civil case addresses private matters, and a criminal case involves punishment by the state, even against the victim's wishes.
• The state pays the bills in criminal cases.
• Many nasty acts and evil deeds are not against the law.
• A special, solemn, social, and political decision is required before an act becomes a crime through laws or ordinances.
• The social context gives an act, and legal responses, to give real meaning.
• Behind every legal judgment of criminality is a more powerful, more basic social judgment: a judgment that this behavior deserves to be outlawed and punished.

Criminal Justice

• Criminal justice is a label for various people, roles, and institutions that define, detect, prosecute, defend, or punish crime.
• "Society" makes the decisions about what is or is not a crime, but collective decisions means those who call the tunes and pay the piper have most say.
• After society makes social judgments, the criminal justice system refines the list, interprets it, and catches/punishes lawbreakers.
• Enforcement is always selective and never total.
• Insiders in the system include criminal code drafters and legislatures, as well as police, detectives, agents, judges, juries, prosecutors, defenders, prison guards, wardens, probation officers, and parole board members.
• Lay people can serve as jurors.
• People seem to devour books about crime and punishment in popular culture.
• The story entails examples of foolishness, vice, self-destruction, selfishness, evil, and greed with few heroes or happy endings.

Main Themes

• Judgments about crime come out of a specific time and place.
• The book focuses on a social history of crime and punishment, not a history of criminal law as lawyers see it.
• It operates under the assumption that the shape of the system is not random but shaped by social structure and norms interacting with the context and specific events.
• Crime and reaction to it are social concepts dependent on the way society is organized.
• Blameworthiness itself varies greatly between societies and time periods.
• Crime definitions are specific to specific societies and constantly changed by social change (criminalizing, decriminalizing, recriminalizing).
• Some crimes can be price-fixing, monopoly, and insider trading.
• Property crimes, crimes against the person, morals offenses, offenses against public order, and regulatory crimes are delineated.
• Predatory crimes are committed for money and gain, corollary crimes support other crimes, political crimes include treason, and crimes of desperation involve people stealing out of necessity.
• All crimes are perceived as threats by society.
• The perceived sense of threat and what to do about dangers changes over time and differs between social groupings.

Functions of Criminal Justice

• Every society must have an avenue to control and limit intolerable behavior.
• Criminal justice does not have a monopoly on restraining evil inclinations as powerful restraints/controls run the machinery without police, courts, or jails.
• Very few social norms are so deeply rooted they enforce themselves universally, leaving room for violations no matter how repulsive the crime.
• Some violations need help from criminal justice through sanctions, rewards, and punishments.
• The pricing or rationing function is how the system works to influence behavior by raising and lowering prices.
• The criminal justice system centralizes and socializes the punishment function, supplements private punishment (ostracism, hitting, scolding), and acts as a substitute for private violence.

Other Subleties and the Importance of Morality and Power

• The criminal justice also functions symbolically, ideologically, and hortatory to teach lessons to those it punishes and society.
• This process announces the values and norms of society as it identifies, chases, arrests, and puts them in prison, the system sends a message about how wrong, evil, and disgrace worthy their actions are.
• Thus, boundaries between good and bad are shown directly, dramatically, and visually through asserting and enforcing them.
• Criminal justice is a living theater where actions influence the morals we obtain.
• Power is brutally displayed and expressed by the penal codes that label some values and behaviors as deviant, abnormal, dangerous, or criminal.
• The history is also a story about the dominant morality and power, because the system throws protection around those who own property.
• There are some myths and ideals about guilt and innocence, but acts of injustice send very powerful messages, too.

Crime, Criminal Justice, and Culture

• Crime stems from personality, character, culture, and that behavior reflects what society makes of people.
• Reaction to crime occur in socially structured/shaped individuals, and also came from somewhere, and were not inborn.
• It is a story of social changes, changes to the culture, the structure of society, and the economic, technological, and social orders.
• Freedom includes a situation of rights, loose ties and light command, of strained authority, an attenuation of the more common human condition: tight societies trying to control the thoughts and actions of their subjects.
• The Revolution itself eroding colonial autocracy began before the shooting and continued afterward, so society was reconstituted in terms of a culture of mobility in the nineteenth century.
• Mobility is also in a country of immigrants, or rolling stones; a country where upward social mobility is possible and shaped criminal justice drastically.
• New technologies, such as the police and the penitentiary, demanded new strategies and techniques.
• The nineteenth century broke the old cages of class, space, and place, but traditional morality from previous centuries survived and meant freedom did not mean shaping how you lived.
• Limitations on liberty meant most black Americans were women without the vote in the 1800s, and most black Americans, and whites, in the South were virtual serfs who could be killed with no impunity.
• The twentieth century was of the Self, of expressive individualism to form one's own life and personality.
• Paradoxically, the culture of individualism worked a revolution for groups, races, and classes where people were to be judged for themselves.
• Twentieth-century exaltation of the Self, an emphasis on the self, and a pathology.

Other Considerations

• Changes have happened in both small but also extremely large ways, the narrative is not necessarily a story of progress.
• A rich culture of liberty has evolved in the United States, but it casts a dark and dangerous shadow.
• Mobility and self-expression have imported side effects of crime and social disorganization, society has been unable to eradicate or control.
• Criminal justice has an impact on the lives, victims, bystanders and communities.
• There must be some impact, some deterrent, some influence on morality and behavior, however, society almost surely a delusion.
• Theories of blame for crime depend on the beliefs one has (poverty, genetics etc) where most of assumptions is that criminals and crime are bad and that crime is a diseas like society with the same way for rebels.